These gems were passed along by Joseph West to ponder as the General Assembly convenes.

“Anyone taken as an individual, is tolerably sensible and reasonable – as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.”

— Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), leading German 18th-century dramatist, poet, and literary theorist and an intellectual contemporary of Hamilton and Madison.

“In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. … Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

— Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (Federalist No. 55, 15 February 1788)